Geo-located data is data or information that is associated with a geographic location. Examples of such data or information can include yellow page listings for businesses, demographic data, encyclopedic data in digital repositories, individual status reports such as those generated from GPS-enabled mobile devices, annotated imagery from various repositories, and geo-located entities extracted from some Web-accessible resource, to name just a few.
One way of representing geo-located data is to visually render a small visual entity on the surface of a map, such as a map that is rendered on a computing device. For example, a user may perform an online search requesting the location of the nearest coffee houses. Responsive to the user's search, a map or other information can be returned to the user's computing device so that a map can be rendered to include various visual entities that represent the location of the coffee houses. As an example, consider FIG. 1. There, an example map is shown generally at 100. Map 100 includes two collections of visual entities designated at 102, 104. In this particular example, the visual entities reside in the form of a rendered push pin.
As the number of visual entities increases to reflect the presence of more and more geo-located data, so too does the incidence of overlap between the visual entities. For example, notice that in collections 102, 104, a number of different visual entities overlap. This can be problematic for a user who desires to interact with a particular visual entity. For example, if the user wishes to click on a partially occluded visual entity, it may be difficult to do so. In some instances, visual entities may be totally occluded, thus making user interaction impossible. Furthermore, a dense geo-located data set can be problematic because it can overlap with other dense data sets and, as a result, a straightforward rendering might further hide information on the map, make different data sets difficult to visually separate, and ultimately might occlude information, such as map legends.